


Us and Immortality

by 20thcenturyvole



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Highlander: The Series, The Authority, The Sandman
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-21 20:33:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/20thcenturyvole/pseuds/20thcenturyvole
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jenny Sparks knows she's not going to live forever. Honestly, who'd want to?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Us and Immortality

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Luthe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luthe/gifts).



On the fifteenth of April, 1912, Jenny Sparks’ parents had the godawful luck of becoming a part of legend. The _Titanic_ hit an iceberg; they died in freezing water, and she was orphaned. It was just one of many ways she’d end up on the front pages of history.

At the time, though, she was barely pubescent and hadn’t even begun to sort herself out. Some months later, on the day she found out that her father’s worst enemy had made off with the fortune that should have been hers, she electrocuted a cat by accident. She didn’t know how she’d done it. She sat there poking the stiff, smoking corpse with a crackling finger, trying to echo the experiments she’d heard about that made disembodied frogs’ legs jerk in the hopes of restarting its heart, and only succeeded in making it smokier. Her godfather hugged her close and mumbled comforting German nonsense under the assumption that Jenny was crying for her dead parents and current misfortune, and perhaps she was, but the cat and the mysterious electricity were a lot closer, filling her nostrils with the stink of burnt fur and her skin with a frightening crackle.

In her later years, Jenny would do her best to leave people with the impression that she had always been Colonel Jennifer Sparks, born with the body of a flat-chested eighteen-year-old, bottle of scotch in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. (It helped that, by that late in the century, anyone who could have said otherwise was dead of old age or misadventure.) Truth was, it took thirty years or so to fake that kind of confidence, and at least ninety to feel it without an ounce of self-delusion. Right now, she was just a posh and slightly priggish little Londoner who knew fuck all. The century came on, regardless.

 

* * *

 

Zurich was a lovely city. Aged fourteen and a half, Jenny was finding it even lovelier with the help of a bottle of gin she’d pinched from Albert’s cabinet.

It was a brilliant afternoon. The sun was shining upon the lawns of the botanical gardens and all the lovely young Olympian hopefuls in it, each of them with the potential to make a dishonest woman of her if she played her cards right. There was an awful lot of flexing going on.

Even the bystanders were attractive. The one she was currently eying up looked a little older than the boys on the lawn. Tall, dark hair, very _very_ handsome. Blue eyes, when they met hers, and a fast quirk to his mouth – but he seemed distracted by his watch and wandered off, away from the field of athletic young men practicing their archery and javelin and shotput and… mmm. Jenny took another discreet swig, and forgot about the blue-eyed man for the moment.

A few minutes later she was restless, the sun a hot distraction, so she got up on boozy legs and wobbled over to a magnolia tree, just to blink up at its blossoms and cool off. She turned her head at a rustle on the path: on the other side of the tree, walking away, was the blue-eyed man.

Because her head was turned to watch him, she only heard the dismayed shout from the lawn and saw a blur in her periphery, and the man staggered and went crashing down with a javelin in his neck.

Jenny didn’t scream. She wasn’t the type, and later years wouldn’t wring it out of her without torture or a skilled tongue. But she did have to fight the urge to throw up under the magnolia tree. 

Mouth pressed to the back of her hand, snorting out breaths like a panicked horse, she approached the man. The worst thing – the absolute _worst thing_ – was that he wasn’t dead yet. His breath came in horrible, gargling rasps, and his hands scrabbled at the spear in his neck. With desperate strength, he pulled it free. Blood spurted powerfully once, twice, then with decreasing force as he twitched and choked and finally went still.

More shouts from behind, and Jenny, though she dreaded letting him leave her gaze, turned around. It was the javelin-thrower, laughing in relief, apologising in rapid German for the mishap, expressing his great relief that she was unhurt. Several yards behind him, the dozen or so people watching the scene looked reassured and turned away. She wondered if they thought the expression on her face was merely fright at the near-miss, and told him that yes, she was alright, but…

The javelin-thrower’s gaze landed behind her, and the grin slid off his face like egg off a windowpane. He took uncertain steps around the tree, taking in the scene: the man on the ground, the bloodied spike, the circle of soaked earth. She heard him whimper, saw him stumble, and then on legs like a newborn calf he ran off between the trees and disappeared.

Well. She supposed that left it up to her to watch the body. Numbly, she crouched down on the other side of the magnolia tree, wondering if she could reach far enough across the pool of blood to close the dead man’s eyes without getting any of it on her.

The world stank of iron. A fly settled on his face.

Then his body jerked, his back arched, and he opened his mouth on an inward breath like a death rattle in reverse. Jenny still didn’t scream, but the noise she muffled behind her clamped hands might have been interpreted as one were the listener uncharitable.

The dead man rolled over onto his side and spat blood. His eyes squeezed shut, but when they opened again they looked straight at her, as blue and unclouded as they’d been not ten minutes prior. They stared at each other as he crouched on hands and knees, shaking visibly, collecting himself. “Sorry about that,” he rasped, smiling weakly.

Naturally, the first thing she managed to say was, “Oh, you’re American.” Feeling stupid, she closed her mouth.

“Not really,” the man said, stumbling to his feet. “I just fake it real well. Say, do you know where the nearest powder room is?” He gestured to his neck and grimaced at his bloody hands. “Doesn’t seem smart to be seen like this.”

“Right,” Jenny said. The shock was wearing off, and the gin with it, and the facts were settling in her head like icy bricks: she’d seen a man die violently and then rise again, no touch of God required. That was as strange as her deadly little sparks, surely? “I think there’s a tea room that way.” She waved a hand.

“Cheers,” the dead man said, brushing leaf mould off his trousers. “God. A javelin? Really? I’m not even supposed to be here.” He frowned at his watch – a strange, clunky, ugly thing; it couldn’t be Swiss. “Have a better day.” He turned to go.

“That thing you can do,” Jenny said. Her voice sounded too loud. It didn’t shake or waver. Perhaps that was what made him pause. “Can you do it to other people? Put them back together if they were to die like you did?”

She didn’t understand the terrible sadness that settled on his face. It was like he’d just realised something awful. It had been a simple enough question: was he a doctor? Could he heal? “No,” he said, and his voice was full of pity. “I’m sorry. No. I can’t help anyone but myself.” Again he turned to walk away; then he stopped to look back at her. “Good luck, though,” he said. “You’re going to need it.”

Crouched under the magnolia tree by the little marsh of blood, Jenny watched him go, and wondered what the hell had just happened.

A month later, they declared world war.

 

* * *

 

The Great War was the making of Jenny Sparks. Turned out it was for the best she’d already seen a man die in a wretched, senseless bloody fumble, or else the trenches might have been a shock.

She killed her first man at the age of fifteen, in a night attack she’d not meant to be any part of – a chap on horseback, sword raised, not quite the baby-skewering Hun on the recruitment posters but, at the time, it hadn’t mattered. The spark bolted from her hands and lit him up from inside; he jerked and screamed, as did the horse, and in a tangle of spasming limbs they went down together. Afterwards, she felt worse about the horse. Perhaps that was why she got recruited.

She was a very young woman, it was true, but she could fry a man alive where he stood and call lightning down from the sky. The home office had use for her.

It was lucky she had Albert for a godfather, respected weirdo that he was. It meant she got to base herself amongst the scientists who studied and directed people like her, and she felt somewhat less like a laboratory specimen when she was allowed to go over the results with her testers in the mess hall afterwards. Albert had always been fascinated by her powers and awfully encouraging of experimentation, so he pushed her and she pushed herself. Thus she learned to travel the electrical currents. From one end of Europe to the other, she carried herself through lines and wires, though she wondered where the hell her body went when it happened. Their neuroscientists gabbled at her about electrical impulses in the brain and muscles and asked her how it felt, and Albert measured the time it took her to travel certain distances and asked her how _long_ it felt, none of which addressed her original question.

What was it _supposed_ to feel like? She was the impulse uncoupled from the nerve, though only for the moment it took to get where she was going. She felt like herself. She could wonder all she liked about how there was a continuation of Jenny Sparks from one end of the wire to the other, but in the end there simply was, and that was what was important.

She gained rank and title as the war dragged on. She was useful in a fight, command came to her naturally, and the men liked the sight of her in a tight pair of jodhpurs. When it was over, the world was a rather more cynical place, and so was she. (Or perhaps it was the other way around. She’d go to her grave wondering that.)

In 1919, they made contact with Sliding Albion, and she married a blue-skinned twat for the good of the British Empire on both sides of an inter-dimensional portal. That particular encounter ended in an absolute clusterfuck, but from it, the whole multiverse unfolded at her feet.

 

* * *

 

 

 

This universe. This was one they kept an eye on.

For one thing, this place had somebody actually _called_ Superman, and nobody meant it even a bit mockingly. He was a terrifying prospect, from the intelligence she gathered: an alien who could easily pass as human, with senses that allowed him to be essentially omnipotent and powers that went beyond anything she’d seen in the ranks of her home reality. His only weakness was an obscure mineral from his native planet, and as far as she could figure out, the only thing that stopped him from laying waste to this Earth – ruling it, enslaving or destroying its people, and leaving it a burnt husk in his wake – was that he was just too _nice_.

Jenny was fucking suspicious of that. ‘Nice’ wasn’t a motive; it was neither stick nor carrot. With the boom of superheroes back home, a part of her felt hope at the sight of a world like this one – but it was rather drowned out by a louder voice that suggested a world that relied on its gods to protect it simply out of the goodness of their hearts was buggered in the long term.

She spent a fortnight gathering intelligence there, writing her report by night and scrapbooking newspaper headlines about Green Lanterns and Batmen to take home as a souvenir. They’d apparently formed a collective, the heroes here, jetting around the world to take care of earthquakes and alien attacks. This failed to scare the shit out of anyone. She wondered if it was something in the water. She wrangled a meeting with their secretary, a disgustingly underutilised Greek princess who turned out to be into light bondage but unforthcoming about any Justice League misdeeds. If there were any skeletons in closets, all of Jenny’s considerable skills were failing to find any aside from the sexism, which Diana sighed about while declining to share a post-coital cigarette. With reluctance and some minor rope burn, Jenny left and wandered the city in thought.

As she often did when thinking, she ended up in a bar. Three whiskeys in, this world still didn’t make sense, but she cared less, so that was good. She was staring glumly at the bottom of her glass when a voice said, “Can I get you another? You look like you need it.”

His accent was English and she was feeling generous, so she didn’t tell him to piss off. “All right,” she said. “A drink’s a drink.”

“Robert,” he said, sticking out his hand with a smile. It was a comforting smile, one that had clearly not seen anything but the most essential dental work, and above it was a face that somehow put her in mind of Tudor paintings, all moled, bent-nosed, and weathered.

He reminded her of home, in other words. She shook the proffered hand. “Jenny,” she said, taking out a cigarette.

“Nice to meet you, Jenny,” Robert said, giving her a light as the barman pushed two whiskeys across the bar and wandered off again. “Cheers.”

“Cheers,” she mumbled, tossing it back in one. Robert winced a bit.

“Hard day?”

Jenny grimaced at her empty glass. “Not really. Honestly, it was pretty nice.” She took a drag and flicked the ash away. “Mostly I just can’t decide whether I’ve turned into a cynical bitch, or whether I’m missing something that’s going to come back and bite me in the arse.” She rubbed her eyes and corrected herself: “Actually, I know I’m a cynical bitch. The second point still stands.”

Robert, to his credit, only nodded, frowning thoughtfully at his drink. “Well, obviously I’ve got no idea what kind of situation you’re in,” he shrugged, “But I think you’re alright as long as cynical doesn’t become paranoid. Couldn’t tell you where the line is, though.”

Jenny grinned at him. “Well, aren’t you bloody helpful?”

He smiled. “Oh, I’m a practiced pub philosopher, me. Would you like to hear my array of comforting platitudes vis-à-vis marriage troubles, money problems and how nobody appreciates you at work?”

“I’ll pass you up, thanks. Got anything about how the world’s going to shit?”

“Ahhh,” he said, shoulders relaxing. “I’m afraid I’ve got nothing there. In my experience, it more or less balances out.”

“Really?” she said flatly. “We had a war to end all wars, and then had an even worse one twenty years later. The empire crumbled. We invented uncounted exciting new ways to kill ourselves, and likely will, soon, out of sheer bloody-minded paranoia. Or is Superman going to crush the Red Menace first?”

Robert shrugged easily, apparently incapable of taking offense. She appreciated that. “I don’t know about that,” he said, with absolute equanimity. “But I’ll tell you what: people aren’t any worse or better than they ever were. And they aren’t any worse at surviving than they ever were, nor, I’ll bet you, any better at predicting the end of the world. Plague and famine, slavery, pogroms, war – I’ll tell you, someone’s world is always ending, but people manage to get through it somehow. I’m not saying it’s ever nice for anyone, but somebody always survives, and has little kids, and those kids grow up into the same disrespectful little shits who won’t learn from history, and the world moves on regardless.”

She smiled at that. “What, so we can leave things be, then? No worries, don’t bother, it’ll all turn out for the best?”

“Nahh.” He sipped his whiskey. “Because people have got to care, too, right? Or they wouldn’t always be moaning about how everything’s going to shit. It takes work to keep living. And we keep doing it. Not a lot of people want to die, right? That’s a mug’s game.”

Jenny laughed and puffed her cigarette, getting to her feet with a minimum of wobble. “Right. And you intend to live forever?”

For a moment, he looked quite serious, though the friendly smile still lingered around his mouth. “Damn right. Things worth sticking around for.” He laughed. “I’ve got to meet a friend in thirty years.”

She had no idea what the hell that meant, but she went back to her own universe in a better mood anyway. 

 

* * *

 

 

Of course, that didn’t last.

It was the Nineties, and she was miserable about it. Not the age, really; that didn’t matter to her. She still looked the same way she’d looked since the end of the first world war, give or take some dignity. Being a few years shy of her inevitable death with nothing to show for it, though – she was pretty fucking miserable about that.

The century had held such promise. An era of superheroes, born from the plague detritus gobbed upon them by another universe. The discovery of the Bleed that let them walk between universes. Teams of great men and women, going out and doing good – people she loved and respected. People she’d led.

People she’d let down.

It all went to shit in the end, didn’t it? Entropic decay. All the best intentions went the way of the dodo eventually – all it took was the first realisation that you could fuck up, and then you spent the rest of your life just waiting to do it again. Over and over again, she got the idea that a team of extraordinary people all working together could change the world for the better. And it could. If you didn’t take into account that you’d have to keep replacing those people as they died or burned out or went insane or turned out to have been insane the whole fucking time, and that threats escalated to match the response, and that the work would never ever be done – if you didn’t take that into account, it was a great idea.

Stormwatch was finished, basically. She was finished. The last time she’d felt this way, she’d crawled into bed and not come out until 1982. She had until the end of the century one way or the other, but she thought it might not be the worst idea to go to bed early and wait out her time in a cocoon of fag-ends and self-pity.

The alley was dark, and her fingertips were numb. She tripped over a row of garbage cans, bent over and threw up. The vodka bottle slipped from her hand and went skittering away across the cobbles, coming to an abrupt stop against someone’s hand. Jenny spat, and wiped her mouth; she didn’t bother looking at who she shared an alley with. She doubted it was as important as her current predicament, which was that she was all out of vodka.

But the figure sprawled by the garbage cans twitched, and groaned, and struggled to sit up. Jenny turned away, not keen on getting into a brawl with someone who slept in refuse. The movement, though, stirred the rubbish enough to send up a waft of stench that went up her nose and directly to her stomach muscles. All she could do was lean against the rough brickwork and heave, even as the figure staggered to his feet.

Colonel Jennifer Sparks, rendered helpless by a bad smell. A banner day for the spirit of the Twentieth Century.

The figure shambled towards her and then stopped, one hand on the wall. She heard a snort, even as she gagged up a thin ribbon of bile and thought longingly of unconsciousness. “You look like I feel,” he said, sounding hungover but incongruously cheery all the same. Also incongruous was the RP of his accent. Apparently it was just a day for posh gits getting tanked and falling over.

“And how’s that?” she rasped.

“You don’t want to know; it’s nothing flattering.” He looked down at himself. “Also, I think you puked on my leg.”

She pushed herself upright. “’S what you get for sleeping there.” Weaving but determined, she started off for the mouth of the alley once more.

“I doubt anyone’s going to give you more to drink with vomit in your hair,” he called after her.

She wheeled around, incensed both at the presumption and at the fact that he was right. “Well, unless you’re offering use of a shower and your personal drinks cabinet, you can fuck off back to your garbage heap,” she said.

He scrubbed a hand through his spiky hair, and she squinted to see his face by the ambient glow of streetlights. It was a pretty memorable face – big nose, sharp features, sort of pretty, and currently quite thoughtful as he looked her up and down. “I’ve got a bath and beer,” he offered.

Jenny paused.

“Try anything funny and I’ll fry the life out of you,” she said.

“Fair enough,” he shrugged, and led her back to his place.

 

It was a nice place, if rather bare and dark – clean, though, and he really did have beer and a bath. He said his name was Adam. He cracked open a bottle and showed her the bathroom, and she didn’t bother closing the door. She could, in fact, fry him if he tried anything, hospitality be damned, and he was certainly one of the nicer people she’d met while drunk and depressed. So she rinsed her hair and soaked in the hot water, and he leaned against the wall outside and sipped his hair of the dog, and little by little, Jenny let her helpless fury go.

“So why were you passed out drunk in an alley?” she asked. It seemed as good a conversational opener as any.

“Why were you throwing up in an alley?” he rejoined.

She smiled pettily, soaping her knees. “I asked first.”

He sighed. “Argued with a friend. You?”

She felt her mouth twist. “Thinking about quitting my job.”

“Well, that’s not the full story.”

“’Argued with a friend’ isn’t either.”

Adam laughed. “I – frankly, I really don’t want to get into specifics.”

“Well, neither do I,” Jenny said, trailing her fingers through the steaming water.

There was a moment of silence. Adam sighed again, drank his beer again. “I did something terrible a long time ago, and my friend found out about it. He confronted me about it, we squabbled – it happens.”

“And then you passed out in an alley,” Jenny pressed.

“Yes, fine. It was actually pretty awful. I don’t like dwelling on the past, and I don’t enjoy fighting.”

Jenny hummed; she couldn’t personally say the same. There was another pause, somewhat more expectant, and she leaned back against the edge of the tub, gathering her thoughts. “I don’t want to die,” she said. Her throat felt tight. “I haven’t done enough.”

He paused. “That’s a pretty good reason.” Then, delicately: “Are you dying?”

She forced a smile, though he couldn’t see her. “My number’s coming up, put it that way.”

“I certainly know how to pick them,” he murmured. She heard another sip. “Can you say you’ve enjoyed it?”

“Hah!” She thought about it. “You know, I can.”

“Hm. Don’t want to be forgotten?”

She inspected her fingernails. “Oh, that’s not the problem, trust me. I just want…” Her hands opened and closed.

“You want?” His voice was patient.

“I want to do some bloody good and make it stick,” she burst out. She rubbed her eyes. “But if experience has taught me anything, it’s that nothing does. And I’m afraid I’ll go out with a whimper, fine. Yes.” She scrubbed her face with both hands, wiping off three days of grime and alcohol sweat.

“Oh, is that all?” Adam said, sounding cheery again. “You’re just afraid of failure.”

“Fuck off,” she said automatically. Then: “Yes. Failure’s no small thing to be afraid of.”

“Ah. Personally, I fear dying more.”

She didn’t. Was that noble, or just sort of masochistic?

He lent her a t-shirt and said she could sleep on his couch – not bursting with chivalrous intent, but she appreciated it anyway. She curled up and listened as he ran his own bath, and thought of the friends she had left alive, and new ones she could make if she made the effort. It was only the seed of an idea. She’d have to do research, and she’d have to do it with a hangover the size of India. But when it was over, she’d have a plan.

She’d been here before, several times, always telling herself that this time would be different. And this burst of optimism was always followed, sooner or later, by some crushing blow or another. Well, maybe it _would_ be different. Maybe this time, she’d die before the blow fell.

 

* * *

 

Shen was on board, bless her magnificent wings and tits. Jack was on board, even though he was being a misery guts about the endeavor. She’d got a lead on the Engineer’s successor, and another on a Dutch dotcom billionaire who apparently had cosmic powers when he wasn’t doped to the eyeballs on smack.

These two, though. Ex-Stormwatch black ops, so damn secret there’d been no proper record of them before King and Trelane brought them in from the cold. Those records, which she'd pinched, were intriguing enough. She was walking up the rickety outdoor staircase of a shabby complex in a shabby part of town, but from what she’d been able to gather, it was a somewhat safer place than it had been a year or so ago. Reports of suspected serial rapists, kiddy fiddlers and drug lords turning up dead all over the place. A wrinkled old cow coming down made eye contact with her long enough to look disapproving; Jenny took her cigarette from her mouth, flicked ash over the railing and grinned back.

Word was, Apollo and Midnighter had survived Bendix’s worst excesses, which meant they were tough. And this whole city seemed to be enjoying a reprieve, which meant they were bored. Frankly, they sounded like her sort of people. She found the right door and knocked.

There was a pause. She didn’t hear feet moving, but hadn’t really expected to. The door creaked open.

It took her a second to be sure it was him - benefit of all that leather, the whole coat-and-cowl business. The scowl was exactly the same, though, as was the magnificently tall and overmuscled stature. She stubbed her cigarette out under her boot and stuck a hand out. “Colonel Jenny Sparks,” she told Midnighter with frank good cheer. “I killed Henry Bendix. Fancy a chat?”

He stared at her. Then, with little change in expression, he let her in.

If the suspicious ginger was hard to recognise out of costume, his mate was the opposite. Apollo’s hair was even more fabulous in person than it was in surveillance footage, and he shared a speaking look with Midnighter before offering to make her some coffee. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d drunk something that wasn’t distilled, but it was polite, so she said yes.

Midnighter leaned against the windowsill, arms folded, but she didn’t bother with the staring match. It wasn’t quite accurate to call this place spartan: the walls were bare, but there was a rug on the floor under the window that she suspected got the most sun in the morning. There was one couch, and a small TV occupying one half of a coffee table. By the window was a potted fern that looked over-watered and barely clinging to life. The floor was clean. There was a small stack of library books on the floor by the wall: mostly novels. There was a clear line of sight through to the kitchen, and when Apollo opened the fridge to grab a pint of milk, she saw beer, a carton of eggs, half a punnet of strawberries - more than she’d been expecting. When he tilted the bottle, frowning, the milk inside took a worryingly long time to follow; his shoulders slumped a little and he put it back. He brought the coffee through anyway, and settled next to Midnighter against the wall.

Jenny remembered the report Trelane had written. No real names - the accounts that the bills from this place went through were under pseudonyms Stormwatch had assigned them. No memories of who they’d once been. Another window near the back led off to a fire escape; there was a faint bootprint on the windowsill, and she’d bet its hinges were the best-oiled in the building. Stormwatch’s severance packages weren’t bounteous, but they were nothing to sneeze at either: this place wasn’t bare because this was all they could afford. These two didn’t need to eat, or sleep, or collapse on a squishy surface at the end of a long day; they certainly didn’t need caffeine to get functional in the morning, but you were supposed to have it around, weren't you? The poor bastards. They had no idea what they were doing, but oh, how they _tried_.

“I’m putting a team together,” she said.

“We’re retired,” Midnighter said flatly.

“Oh, yes,” Jenny said, sipping her coffee. Blargh. She’d never liked the stuff. “And it’s a keen neighborhood watch program that’s dropped the crime stats around here through the floor.”

They exchanged another look. “What’s this about?” Apollo said, eyes sliding from Midnighter’s face to hers. “Stormwatch let us go. We paid our dues.”

Jenny smiled down at her cup. “This isn’t Stormwatch,” she said. “Stormwatch has pretty much gone tits-up. No more funding, nobody willing to give it the oversight that it’s supposed to have, according to all the fussy little bastards we’re supposed to be answerable to. And that’s pretty fucking unfortunate, because the world still needs saving from time to time, regardless of whether it’s on anyone else’s terms. Now, you two don’t need cash incentives, and you certainly don’t need permission, but I’m pretty sure you _do_ have a need to fix things when they break. Which means _I_ need _you_.” She shrugged. “Or you can stay here, hiding your tights in the closet, and climb out the window for a bit of sneaky mugger-bashing whenever the itch gets too bad. Your choice. But I’m an old lady, and I’d like to achieve something good before the century’s out.”

Another look exchanged. She wearied of them. They reminded her that she was sad and alone, without anyone to exchange such looks with - were she to communicate with a teammate, it would have to involve words. Then again, in nearly a hundred years she’d never gone on the run with anyone for any great length of time, so maybe it wasn’t anything to envy.

“We’ll think about it,” Apollo said at last. Midnighter nodded, scowling a little less.

She was ninety nine years old. She knew a yes when she heard one.

 

* * *

 

Seven months later, she electrocuted God’s brain. As ways to die went, it was a pretty magnificent one, and solved a lot of immediate problems.

Her teammates surrounded her, all of them looking distressed and mournful and various other quite gratifying things. As the seconds ticked down to midnight on New Year’s Eve, and the black spots twinkled at the corners of her vision, she wondered what her successor would do with her life. If she’d be born into wealth and privilage. If she’d talk much with her parents. If she'd like the people who taught her to use her powers. If she’d shag a lot of people and regret a lot of things. If...

 

In a hospital in Singapore, the spirit of the 21st century opened her mouth and cried her little lungs out.

**Author's Note:**

> Now that this is up, it seems time to add some notes! Honestly, this could have been called "Three times Jenny Sparks got drunk, met an immortal and seriously questioned her life (+1 time she had coffee with the guys who'd end up adopting her successor)", but that seemed long-winded. (Also, I only realised the format once it was done.)
> 
> The prompt for this was a really cool crossover idea - that Jenny Sparks, over the course of her life, would keep meeting certain people like Jack Harkness and Hob Gadling and Methos (sorry I couldn't fit the Doctor in there, Luthe!). The idea of Jenny Sparks encountering immortals, given that she always knew exactly when she would die, seemed to raise a pretty intriguing theme, so it turned out to mostly be about Jenny Sparks and death, with guest-stars.
> 
> Shout-out to Musicforwolves for the speedy beta! Any mistakes left over are down to me.


End file.
